# Examining Multilingual Embedding Models Cross-Lingually Through LLM-Generated Adversarial Examples

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08638 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08638/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01130/) (2019)
- [MLQA: Evaluating Cross-lingual Extractive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07475/) (2019)
- [PAWS-X: A Cross-lingual Adversarial Dataset for Paraphrase Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11828/) (2019)
- [mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19669/) (2024)
- [mMARCO: A Multilingual Version of the MS MARCO Passage Ranking Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13897/) (2021)
- [Overview of the TREC 2023 NeuCLIR Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08071/) (2024)
- [Overview of the TREC 2022 NeuCLIR Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12367/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Sentence Smith: Controllable Edits for Evaluating Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14734/) (2025)
- [ALEE: Any-Language Evaluation of Embeddings via English-Centric Minimal Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00171/) (2026)
- [Cross-Lingual Jailbreak Detection via Semantic Codebooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25716/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The evaluation of cross-lingual semantic search models is often limited to existing datasets from tasks such as information retrieval and semantic textual similarity. We introduce Cross-Lingual Semantic Discrimination (CLSD), a lightweight evaluation task that requires only parallel sentences and a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate adversarial distractors. CLSD measures an embedding model's ability to rank the true parallel sentence above semantically misleading but lexically similar alternatives. As a case study, we construct CLSD datasets for German--French in the news domain. Our experiments show that models fine-tuned for retrieval tasks benefit from pivoting through English, whereas bitext mining models perform best in direct cross-lingual settings. A fine-grained similarity analysis further reveals that embedding models differ in their sensitivity to linguistic perturbations. We release our code and datasets under AGPL-3.0: https://github.com/impresso/cross_lingual_semantic_discrimination